Hi,
I fully agree with Paul Reilly and T.V. Raman. I think the last brick that is remaining to make emacs a full-featured modern desktop is a web browser (I'm not talking about w3m)
 I have successfully merged yesterday all that remained of my desktop environment into emacs : IRC and IM. Now, my time is shared among exclusively emacs and firefox, and the next logical step would be merging both. What I think would be the ultimate desktop environment would be a way to have emacs buffers which are web tabs, with a web major mode. It would use two keyboard maps : one for web surfing, which would we similar to what conkeror uses, and one for input, which would be the standard one (plus maybe keys to get out of the input box). I have absolutely no idea of how feasible this is, but when I saw chrome announcement, first thing that came to my mind is "hey, these guys start from scratch with a clean API, it may be easier to wrap into emacs". I hope that some talented hacker (ie not me) start a project to do this integration. I'd be happy to help, and I suspect many others too.